Things I Read During the Quarantine: Part 1, Introduction
Background
In this post, I won't talk about any of the books I read during the quarantine but on the books I read in the past, and about my reading habits.
The oldest book I remember reading is probably, everyone's favourite The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. May be that's why I can't stop eating. Anyways, it has nothing to do with what I will be talking about in this post. The early days in my elementary school I was into Sherlock Holms, and other detective novels. With that said, I realized that I've never read the books by Christie Agatha, so that's what I've been reading nowadays. DO NOT WRITE THE SPOILERS IN THE COMMENT SECTION!!!!!! Also I was reading a lot of books about mathematics (although I don't remember having the eureka moments, so probably I never understood them at all :P).
Middle School to high school, I was reading the scientific books. In the middle school, I remember I was reading about many books on biology. I think most of the biological knowledge I have now is from that time (I need to update myself I guess...). Mainly the translated one by Simon Singh. Big Bang, The Fermat's Last Theorem, The Code Book to name a few. From the translator, I learned about Leonard Susskind. Read few books by him. The book, "The cosmic landscape" influenced me in the deepest level; probably that's why I never really liked (read) Hawking. I seriously wanted to be a cosmologist and live in some really rural area and spending days gazing stars. The section on flying a balloon to do X-ray astronomy in the middle of Autralia pushed me to do undergrad in Australia. Although I'm currently in Scotland, where it's always rainy and crwoded during winter, which supposed to have the clearest sky (due to the low humidity); I still haven't given up on living in a rural county (I have a big plan, but won't reveal it here :) ).
In the university (undergraduate), I was busy studying, but reading was mostly focused on philosophy, philosophical foundation of science, rather than scientific facts themselves, and history to understand historical background on how amazing ideas had to emerge in that particular place and time. Penrose (the Nobel prize of the year!), William Hardy McNeill, and Jared Diamond to name a few. Seriously, it's fascinating to know various changes in climates, politics, etc... gave rise to scientific revolution and development of philosophy, democracy and so forth! Of course, complexity of the human society is not at all a thing that can be understood by a small brain of mine!
Nowadays, meaning after I finished undergrad till now, I am interested in psychology, especially how childhood development influences the adulthood. The modern philosophy on cognition and free will are deeply related to neuroscience and hence psychology. In fact, many psychologists were philosophers in the early 19s. Many of the original Fraud's ideas are later proven to be wrong or somewhat inaccurate (of course, that's like saying Isaac Newton was wrong for not discovering relativity); but there are many things we can take from his ideas. I think people are interesting, not like superficial psychology that you learn in psychology 101 or on some cheap self-help books you find in stores, but really trying to understand why certain people act in some way is fascinating. I think understanding them will make me able to understand myself better, hence to understand others better, and be a bit kinder (?). In regard to this theme I read few classic novels (I think the authors expresses the inner mechanics of their brain through fictional characters).
What's next?
Now you know what I've been reading, I hope this will help you with understanding how I ended up on drawing conclusions to each of the books that I will be presenting in the next few posts.
The first book I will be introducing is "Juvenile delinquents who can't cut a cake" (ケーキの切れない不良少年たち) by Koji Miyaguchi (宮口幸治).
